Protein

In recent year, a lot of ideas have become strangely popular on this place that we call the Internets, one of those is concern over various food allergies and intolerances. As I’ll discuss below, not only are true food allergies and intolerance two totally different things, there is a lot of nonsensical information being thrown around about food allergies.

What seems to have happened is that one person stated that certain ideas were true and a bunch of people who didn’t know any better simply started repeating those ideas until they became an accepted ‘truth’. Unfortunately, science says different and that’s what I’m going to look at.

The most common one that seems to be constantly repeated is that if you eat the same food (usually protein since most true food allergies are caused by proteins) continuously, you can give yourself an allergy to that food. This happens to be utterly wrong as I’ll show below.

There are other silly ideas, one of the dumbest I’ve seen of late is that you can cure a food allergy by not eating that food for 6 weeks. This is not only wrong but potentially fatal. True food allergies (again, I’ll discuss what this means in a second) never go away; if someone has a true allergy to a food, they can’t ever eat that food again for all practical purposes.

Actually, that’s not entirely true, one weird study showed that children with peanut allergies could eventually get to where they could eat half a peanut but it took months and months of feeding them like 1/4 peanut to get them to that level. Hooray. For all practical purposes, a true food allergy never goes away and the idea that abstaining from that food will make it go away is simply absurd.

Since most food allergies occur in response to protein foods, I’m actually going to simply be excerpting the section from The Protein Book about food allergies and intolerances. For anybody who’s interested, I’ve included the references cited in this section at the end of the article.